Wednesday, 28 January 2015

Re-Inscribing Race Through Mixed-Race Myths

We often turn on
questions of ‘colouredness’ and consider their weight, form and effect at
different moments in our contemporary democracy. In all of their phrasings, the
questions that arise when attempting to make sense of mixed-raced identity
include multiple key features that are variegated throughout South African
history.

These features include a
definitional anxiety that expresses an obsession with defining who is within
and without perfidious racial boundaries through race policing. This often
arrives attached to historically burdened and problematic discourses of
miscegenation and hybridity – the enduring idea that ‘colouredness’ is a
halfway point between blackness and whiteness, or as the ‘perceived product of
the transgression of a sacrosanct boundary, has connoted lack, deficiency,
moral and cultural degeneration’, as academic Desiree Lewis argues.

Many of these questions
emerge as a concern with what this identity means for belonging and citizenship
in our present context, or as a misplaced desire to transcend or eliminate race
through homogenising society. The return to this question, in all its permutations,
reveals the importance of recognising the lived experience of race and its
construction, as race continues to take up enduring residence in national
conversation.

In the past few weeks,
there have been references to proximity politics that considers ‘colouredness’
in relation to blackness and whiteness, and the troubling idea that mixed-raced
children are the panacea that will solve the race issue. The logic behind this
idea is that in a world in which we are all one race, there will be no racism
because it will not be able to sustain itself in the absence of different race
groups. This logic is both idealistic and deeply flawed. The problem is the
assumption that a homogenous society, in which everyone becomes one race,
renders race null and void, and consequently removes the impact of the entire
project of systematically enshrined racism, and the many other social issues
that are entangled with race. It is a reduction of the race issue to
aesthetics, without an understanding that those aesthetics are fundamentally
linked to the lived experience.

A focus on the aesthetics
of race, when it is unlinked to experience, does not reveal how discrimination
has many complex and deeply institutionalised layers. It does not seek to
dismantle structural oppression, but rather deals with how people look, in an
attempt to deal with the way people experience their humanity. The idea that
race is mere aesthetics treats race and racism as a simple issue, without the
complex, history-laden baggage that accompanies it and how it is embedded in
different ways in the structures of our society. In Wittgenstein’s Remarks on
Colour, he notes: ‘We must always bear in mind the question: How do people
learn the meaning of colour names?’ Consequently, it is not enough to focus on
aesthetics. Rather, we need to consider the meaning of race in our societies,
its overt and covert expressions, and its effect on how we both see and
experience the world, and reflect this, both consciously and unconsciously,
through learned behaviour.

The longings for a
utopian, homogenous society, untouched by any aspect of our racial pathologies,
ignores the fact that in many of the homogenous societies of the world,
including China and India, the effects of centuries of racial logic remain,
which include colourism – where people get treated differently because of skin
tone – and the effect of Western beauty ideals. But beyond this, this longing
does not recognise that people do not have the same lived experience simply of
aesthetic similarities.

Both the experience and
the aesthetics of ‘colouredness’, or mixed-racedness, are rooted in difference.
As academics Grunebaum and Robins argue: ‘There is no single coloured
experience, nor any single voice that speaks in its name.’ The assumption that
all mixed-race people, no matter how they self-identify, have the same
experience or aesthetics is deeply flawed. As novelist and literary critic Kole
Omotoso poetically phrases it: coloured people range in skin tone “from
charcoal black to breadcrust brown, sallow yellow and finally off-white
cream…”.

The trouble with attempts
to police race, which reveals its fallacies, are rooted in this difference as
policing race on the basis of aesthetics is nearly impossible. The experience
of life within this skin is complicated by different kinds of privilege that
extend beyond the politics of beauty – how people with light skin are seen as
more attractive – to have a profound impact on people’s lived experience
because it marks the most intimate aspects of their humanity.

The inherited pathologies
of the past continue to haunt our present. This point was highlighted in a
recent column by Dr Richard Pithouse, where he argued that racism is a
‘dynamic’ phenomenon that is able to mutate in different contexts, across time
and space. Pithouse highlights the way contemporary forms of racism riff on the
past, but take their own, new form in present contexts, which are often not as
easy to identify. This will not simply disappear in a world where everyone is
mixed-raced. He argues: ‘If we are not attentive to the ways in which racism
mutates over time and we focus the bulk of our opposition to racism on its
outmoded forms, then its forms that are most dangerous, because they are
authorised by contemporary forms of power, will not be recognised and opposed
with sufficient clarity and force.’

But beyond race, other
forms of discrimination remain, and are themselves able to mutate. We do not
get rid of class and gender issues, or any other form of discrimination that
has been able to mutate and assume the language of our time, by homogenising
society on the basis of race. The issue goes further than racism, colourism and
the aesthetics of difference. It is about the way we re-inscribe race and
re-invest in its language, postures, discourses, structures and institutions,
which requires us to directly address structural oppression, in its many forms,
and not simply aesthetics.

Beyond aesthetics, the
return to race in our national conversation is a reminder that, as Jamaican
poet Staceyann Chin phrases it: ‘We are not simply at a political crossroad/we
are buried knee deep in the quagmire/of a battle for our humanity.’

Frantz Fanon

1925 - 1961

This Blog

This blog contains resources directly related to Frantz Fanon's life and work, the secondary literature on Fanon and other resources useful for engaging Fanon's ideas here and now. Some of what is here comes from, or relates to, a particular set of ongoing discussions around Fanon's work in Grahamstown.